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Government and military organizations in the Asia-Pacific region are being targeted by a previously unknown advanced persistent threat (APT) actor, per latest research conducted by Albert Priego of Group-IB The Singapore-headquartered company, in a  report  shared with The Hacker News, said it's tracking the ongoing campaign under the name  Dark Pink  and attributed seven successful attacks to the adversarial collective between June and December 2022. The bulk of the attacks have singled out military bodies, government ministries and agencies, and religious and non-profit organizations in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, with one unsuccessful intrusion reported against an unnamed European state development body based in Vietnam. The threat actor is estimated to have commenced its operations way back in mid-2021, although the attacks ramped up only a year later using a never-before-seen custom toolkit designed to pl...

The first Patch Tuesday fixes shipped by Microsoft for 2023 have addressed a total of  98 security flaws , including one bug that the company said is being actively exploited in the wild. 11 of the 98 issues are rated Critical and 87 are rated Important in severity, with one of the vulnerabilities also listed as publicly known at the time of release. Separately, the Windows maker is expected to release updates for its Chromium-based Edge browser.  The vulnerability that's under attack relates to  CVE-2023-21674  (CVSS score: 8.8), a privilege escalation flaw in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call ( ALPC ) that could be exploited by an attacker to gain SYSTEM permissions. "This vulnerability could lead to a browser sandbox escape," Microsoft noted in an advisory, crediting Avast researchers Jan Vojtěšek, Milánek, and Przemek Gmerek for reporting the bug. While details of the vulnerability are still under wraps, a successful exploit requires an attacker to have ...

The advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as  StrongPity  has targeted Android users with a trojanized version of the Telegram app through a fake website that impersonates a video chat service called Shagle . "A copycat website, mimicking the Shagle service, is used to distribute StrongPity's mobile backdoor app," ESET malware researcher Lukáš Štefanko  said  in a technical report. "The app is a modified version of the open source Telegram app, repackaged with StrongPity backdoor code." StrongPity , also known by the names APT-C-41 and Promethium, is a cyberespionage group active since at least 2012, with a majority of its operations focused on Syria and Turkey. The existence of the group was first publicly reported by Kaspersky in October 2016. The threat actor's  campaigns  have since expanded to encompass more targets across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, with the intrusions leveraging watering hole attacks and phishing messages to a...

A comprehensive analysis of the cryptographic protocols used in the Swiss encrypted messaging application Threema has revealed a number of loopholes that could be exploited to break authentication protections and even recover users' private keys. The seven attacks span three different threat models,  according  to ETH Zurich researchers Kenneth G. Paterson, Matteo Scarlata, and Kien Tuong Truong, who reported the issues to Threema on October 3, 2022. The weaknesses have since been addressed as part of  updates  released by the company on November 29, 2022. Threema is an encrypted messaging app that's used by more than 11 million users as of October 2022. "Security and privacy are deeply ingrained in Threema's DNA," the company  claims  on its website. Officially used by the Swiss Government and the Swiss Army, it's also advertised as a secure alternative alongside other services such as Signal, Meta-owned WhatsApp, and Telegram. While Threema has been ...

A new malware campaign has been observed targeting Italy with phishing emails designed to deploy an information stealer on compromised Windows systems. "The info-stealer malware steals sensitive information like system info, crypto wallet and browser histories, cookies, and credentials of crypto wallets from victim machines," Uptycs security researcher Karthickkumar Kathiresan  said  in a report. Details of the campaign were first  disclosed  by Milan-based IT services firm SI.net last month. The multi-stage infection sequence commences with an invoice-themed phishing email containing a link that, when clicked, downloads a password-protected ZIP archive file, which harbors two files: A shortcut (.LNK) file and a batch (.BAT) file. Irrespective of which file is launched, the attack chain remains the same, as opening the shortcut file fetches the same batch script designed to install the information stealer payload from a GitHub repository. This is achieved by l...

UPDATE: CVE-2022-23529 Retracted Following Review Auth0 and Unit 42 said they are formally retracting CVE-2022-23529 (CVSS score: 7.6) based on the fact that several prerequisites are essential for exploitation. The cybersecurity company said "important security checks" have been added to fix the problem. "The security issue remains a concern only when the jsonwebtoken library is used in an insecure way," the maintainers said in an advisory. "In such a scenario, if all the prerequisites are met, the issue may be exploitable; however, the source of this risk is the calling code and not the library itself." A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the open source jsonwebtoken (JWT) library that, if successfully exploited, could lead to remote code execution on a target server. "By exploiting this  vulnerability , attackers could achieve remote code execution (RCE) on a server verifying a maliciously crafted JSON web token (JWT) reques...

The threat actors behind the  Kinsing  cryptojacking operation have been spotted exploiting misconfigured and exposed PostgreSQL servers to obtain initial access to Kubernetes environments. A second initial access vector technique entails the use of vulnerable images, Sunders Bruskin, security researcher at Microsoft Defender for Cloud,  said  in a report last week. Kinsing has a  storied history  of targeting  containerized environments , often leveraging misconfigured open Docker daemon API ports as well as abusing newly disclosed exploits to drop cryptocurrency mining software. The threat actor, in the past, has also been discovered  employing a rootkit  to hide its presence, in addition to terminating and uninstalling competing resource-intensive services and processes. Now according to Microsoft, misconfigurations in  PostgreSQL servers  have been co-opted by the Kinsing actor to gain an initial foothold, with the company...

A group of academics has demonstrated novel attacks that leverage Text-to-SQL models to produce malicious code that could enable adversaries to glean sensitive information and stage denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. "To better interact with users, a wide range of database applications employ AI techniques that can translate human questions into SQL queries (namely  Text-to-SQL ),"  Xutan Peng , a researcher at the University of Sheffield, told The Hacker News. "We found that by asking some specially designed questions, crackers can fool Text-to-SQL models to produce malicious code. As such code is automatically executed on the database, the consequence can be pretty severe (e.g., data breaches and DoS attacks)." The  findings , which were validated against two commercial solutions  BAIDU-UNIT  and  AI2sql , mark the first empirical instance where natural language processing (NLP) models have been exploited as an attack vector in the wild. The black box ...